points to another casualty of pipikism: the term “deep state.” Originally, it was popularized by leftists in Turkey to describe the reality of covert activities carried out by a network of military and elite actors. But Bannon and Trump co-opted it to describe any form of power—economic, judicial, journalistic, intelligence—that posed a barrier to their unfettered and often unconstitutional exercise of power, while simultaneously deploying it as an easy scapegoat for their failures. Nothing was ever their responsibility; it was always the fault of the “deep state.”
